Friday, November 30, 2012

From the Howard Zinn ProjectNov. 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain (1835), Gordon Parks (1912), Shirley Chisholm (1924), and Abbie Hoffman (1936).Who else should we add to the list?It is also the day in 1930 when fearless labor leader Mary Harris "Mother" Jones died. (Thanks to Bread and Roses 1912-2012
for the reminder.) Opponents called Mother Jones “the most dangerous
woman in America." When she was denounced on the floor of the U.S.
Senate as “the grandmother of all agitators,” she said she hoped to live
long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.

Bikini Kill sparked the riot-grrrl movement. It also made great music.

In May of 1989, a junior at Evergreen State College, in Olympia,
Washington, named Kathleen Hanna traveled to Seattle to meet Kathy
Acker, a forty-two-year-old author she admired. Acker, who had written
about abuse, incest, and other forms of sexual extremity, was conducting
workshops at the Center on Contemporary Art. Hanna, then nineteen,
bluffed her way into an interview. As reported in Sara Marcus’s
carefully documented history, “Girls to the Front,” when Hanna explained
that she was interested in spoken-word performance and in writing,
Acker told her that she should be in a band: “There’s more of a
community for musicians than for writers.”

Hanna felt
rebuffed at first, but she ultimately took the advice. In 1990, after
touring with a band called Viva Knievel, she formed a new group,
eventually called Bikini Kill, with a drummer named Tobi Vail, whom
Hanna knew from Olympia. Vail had been publishing and writing a feminist
zine called Jigsaw, which Hanna admired. Hanna and Vail found
bandmates in the bassist Kathi Wilcox, who had never been in a band
before, and the guitarist Billy Karren. This led to both a small
catalogue of recordings and the birth of the very sort of community that
Acker was referring to. People often use the phrase “riot grrrl” as
shorthand for the feminist music activism of the nineties, but sometimes
they use it simply to refer to Bikini Kill. The group’s first two vinyl
recordings are being reissued, twenty years after their initial
release, on a label set up by the members to preserve their output. Even
though the riot-grrrl community has come to dwarf the songs in
historical memory—that was the point, really—the music is still a
pungent tonic.

Bands like Gossip, who became pop stars (in
England, at least), cite the influence of Bikini Kill and the riot-grrrl
movement. Members of the Russian political collective Pussy Riot, two
of whom are currently in prison for hooliganism, also cite the band’s
impact. (Pussy Riot is known for wearing balaclavas during public
actions; is it coincidence that Hanna wore one in “No Alternative
Girls,” a short film, from 1994, by Tamra Davis?)

Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton delivered on Wednesday what might be her last
public address before an LGBT audience as chief diplomat for the United
States when she told group of LGBT Foreign Service officers their
service is integral to the country.

“Creating an LGBT-welcoming
workplace is not just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing,”
Clinton said. “And part of that is because the nature of diplomacy has
changed and we should and need to keep up. Today, we expect our
diplomats to build relationships not just with their counterparts in
foreign governments, but from people from every continent and every walk
of life, and, in order to do that, we need a diplomatic core that is as
diverse as the world we work in.”

Additionally, Clinton said
having an LGBT-inclusive State Department makes the Foreign Service
corps “better advocates” for American values.

“When anyone is
persecuted anywhere and that includes when LGBT people are persecuted,
we’re kept from fully participating in their societies,” Clinton said.
“They suffer, but so do we. We are diminished because our commitment to
the human rights of all people has to be a continuing obligation and
mission of everyone who serves in the government of the United States.”

Clinton
delivered the remarks in Benjamin Franklin room at the State Department
to observe the 20th anniversary of the department’s LGBT affinity
group, Gays & Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies, or GLIFAA.

She
reminded the estimated 200 people in attendance that world in which
GLIFAA was created was much different than today and the organization
has worked over the course of 20 years to create a fairer workplace for
LGBT Foreign Service officers.

“As we heard, in 1992, you could be
fired for being gay,” Clinton said. “Just think about all of the
exceptional public servant — the brilliant strategists, the linguists,
the experts — fired for no reason other than their sexual orientation.
Think of what we lost because we were unable of their hard work,
expertise and experience.”

Clinton also gave recognition to Tom
Gallagher, whom she said joined the State Department in 1965 and in the
early 1970′s became the first openly gay Foreign Service officer. He was
in the audience during Clinton’s speech and rose when the secretary
mentioned him.

In
1998, 15 religious right organizations launched a huge advertising
campaign to promote "pray away the gay" programs. Anti-gay activist
Robert Knight called the "Truth in Love" campaign the "Normandy Landing
in the larger cultural wars."

Things didn't quite work out as Knight had hoped. In 2000, I photographed their poster boy, John Paulk,
in a Washington, DC gay bar. In 2003, I joined attorney Mike Hamar in
reporting that the star of their television campaign, Michael Johnston,
was hooking up with men he was meeting on the Internet.

The
already shredded credibility of such groups markedly deteriorated this
year after Exodus International's leader, Alan Chambers, said that his
"ex-gay" ministry did not work for 99.9 percent of clients. This
followed a similar admission from Love In Action ministry leader John
Smid. The icing on the cake occurred this spring when Dr. Robert Spitzer
renounced his infamous 2001 "ex-gay" study claiming that some gay
people could go straight.

The cherry on top of the icing came last
month when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting
reparative therapy for minors in California, which greatly damaged an
industry where more than half of the clients are youth.

This week,
the rest of the chickens came home to roost and the roles from 1998
were reversed, with the LGBT community and its allies storming the
beaches of the "ex-gay" shoreline.

On Monday, the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC) filed a lawsuit on behalf of the victims of
reparative therapy. Representing four clients, and two of their mothers,
SPLC slammed Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), its
director Arthur Abba Goldberg, and life coach Alan Downing, with an
historic complaint alleging consumer fraud.

SPLC's lawsuit
is based on JONAH and Downing's "misguided and erroneous belief that
that being gay is a mental disorder -- a position rejected by the
American Psychiatric Association four decades ago." The lawsuit says
that some Plaintiffs were instructed to "remove all clothing during both
individual and group therapy sessions including an instruction to Chaim
Levin to hold his penis in front of Defendant Downing.

WASHINGTON
-- U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) has announced that she will
introduce a House resolution on Wednesday, Nov. 28, asking the U.S. House of Representatives
to encourage states to take steps to prevent minors from being harmed
by controversial and discredited gay-to-straight conversion therapy.

Jenny Werwa, Speier's Communications Director, told LGBTQ Nation
on Tuesday that the Congresswoman's efforts stem from the recent, "well
publicized tragic examples of the harmful psychological abuse inflicted
on young Americans by these dangerous sexual orientation conversion
practices," also known as reparative therapy, which aims to convert or “repair” an individual’s sexual orientation.

Werwa said that Speier's office has been working closely in recent months with Christine Sun, Legal Director for the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out, a Vermont-based
watch group that has tracked "Ex-Gay" organizations and therapists who
practice reparative therapy.

Speier's legislative effort, a House
resolution entitled "Stop Harming Our Kids" (SHOK), was inspired by
California's recent passage of legislation authored by State Sen. Ted
Lieu, which prohibits reparative therapy for minors. The historic bill was signed into law on Sept. 29 by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Speier
has also been investigating whether taxpayer funded programs such as
Medicaid or TRICARE healthcare programs have been used to reimburse
therapists who practice conversion therapy.Speier will discuss
the resolution and her efforts at a press conference on Wednesday, and
is expected to be joined by advocacy leaders and survivors of sexual
orientation change practices. Sheldon Bruck, a plaintiff in a new lawsuit against a New Jersey organization for offering fraudulent conversion therapy services, will share his story.

Former
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) might have left his
state’s fiscal house in utter disarray, but a study released Thursday
finds that he also did California’s young people a huge favor by signing a bill decriminalizing marijuana.

Overall, the
study found that the decline in youth crime in California largely
mirrors the overall decline in crime across the state since the 1950s.
Even so, CJCJ research fellow Mike Males pointed specifically to
marijuana decriminalization as leading to a 61 percent drop in small
marijuana possession arrests from 2010 to 2011.

Interestingly, all
other categories in the state’s Department of Finance crime reporting
statistics saw significant declines from 2010-2011 as well. Arrests of
young people for violent crime dropped 16 percent over 2010, and murder
was down 26 percent. Property crimes were also down 16 percent, and
rapes were down by 10 percent.

All together, California’s youth
crime rate plunged an astonishing 20 percent in one year, the study
concludes. Compared to the 1970s, as President Richard Nixon’s (R) drug
war was getting underway in earnest, youth crime in California is down a
whopping 68 percent — and Males even wrote that may be lowballing the
estimate.

“Many youth offenses may have been hidden in the past,
due to historic data collection limitations,” the study explains. “An
average of 90,000 arrests per year in the 1950s, were reported as
‘delinquent tendencies,’ a broad category that included various violent,
property, drug, and status offenses.”

When
the young woman lay in agony in the hospital late last month, there
should have been nothing standing between her and an emergency medical
intervention. But instead, what stood between Savita Halappanavar,
a 31 year-old, Indian-born dentist, and the Irish doctor treating her,
was a dangerously wide grey area that has long hovered over Ireland’s
constitution. As she suffered through complications stemming from a
miscarriage, she begged for an abortion. It was denied, reportedly
because the fetal heartbeat was still present. Her husband later recalled that Savita was told by a medical consultant that an abortion would be impossible because Ireland “is a Catholic Country.”

That
exchange, seared in her aggrieved family's mind, lay bare the medieval
nature of one of the Western hemisphere’s harshest abortion bans.
Savita, a Hindu born in India, argued that she was “neither Irish nor
Catholic." None of that mattered, because Ireland’s anti-abortion law,
as it was interpreted by her medical provider, trumped questions of both
bodily sovereignty and cultural difference.

Savita’s case was one
of countless pregnancies across Ireland in which a woman’s fate may
come down to a subjective medical assessment colored by “conscience.” To
qualify under Ireland’s near-total abortion ban, Savita’s life was
apparently deemed not sufficiently endangered—until the two heartbeats
ended after days of crippling pain, leaving both the fetus and the
mother dead, the latter of sep­ticaemia.

Yet
Savita’s tragedy isn’t about her Indian identity per se; it points to
the barriers facing all women in Ireland. The unwritten religious
subtext of the policy—“cruelty disguised as piety,” in the words of one columnist—effectively
places the bodies of both Catholic and non-Catholic women, citizens and
migrants alike, under a sweeping, vague rule at odds with rights
enshrined in international law.

The main legal guidance for the abortion ban is the case of X, involving a 14 year-old rape victim who was blocked from traveling to England for an abortion. The court set the medical threshold for abortion as
“real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of
the mother.” The lack of concrete legislation on the standard has left
the the one narrow avenue for legal abortion mostly in the hands of
doctors. For a woman ineligible for a medically necessary abortion,
virtually the only safe option is to travel to the United Kingdom or
another country to terminate her pregnancy.

Even
though most of 2012 was a lovefest between feminists and the Obama
administration, the administration came under plenty of fire from
activists who felt he was often too quick to compromise. Some feminist
organizations, like the National Organization for Women,
denounced the president for signing an executive order barring
insurance plans on health-care exchanges from covering abortion, even
though a handful of anti-abortion Democrats were determined to destroy
health-care reform if they didn’t get this concession.

More
troubling was that, in late 2011, the administration took away a victory
that feminists thought was in the bag. For years, anti-choicers from
the Bush administration had killed applications to make Plan B, an
emergency contraceptive, available to all customers over the counter,
even though the makers had repeatedly demonstrated that their product
met all the safety standards required. The debate centered around giving
access to minors. Bush-appointed FDA officials voiced concerns
that Plan B on shelves would encourage teenage girls to have sex, and
even, in the words of one official, that the drug would “lead
adolescents to form sex-based cults around the use of Plan B.”

In
2011, the scientific arguments in favor won out, and the Food and Drug
Administration prepared to grant Plan B over-the-counter status. But in a
historically unprecedented move, Department of Health and Human
Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA, requiring Plan B
to stay behind pharmacy counters, where only those 17 and older can buy
it without a prescription if they show identification.Despite Obama’s comments defending the decision,
in which he claimed “common sense” holds that Plan B shouldn’t be sold
“alongside bubble gum or batteries,” the move was widely perceived as
shameless political pandering. Prior to this, the president had defended
the reproductive rights of minors, opposing parental-notification laws for abortionand arguing for comprehensive sex education.
By stating that girls should not be “punished with a baby” for having
sex, he showed he was not just pro-choice but understood the right-wing
obsession with sin and punishment, which is what drives conservative
opposition to expanded reproductive health-care access.

A rainbow coalition
of Democratic voters gave Barack Obama a victory over big Wall Street
money and the steady drumbeat of hard-right racism. Nearly 45 percent of
the president’s voters were people of color, with their numbers
augmented by white women, youth and trade unionists. It was enough to
keep him in the White House, but not enough to decisively change the
overall balance of forces.Now the harder struggles begin—for Obama, for the Democratic Party and for the Left. Tough choices face all three.

Obama
has to decide how he wants to govern in his second term. Does he want
to be remembered as a center-right conciliator of neoliberal austerity
and militarism who discounted key components of his rainbow? Or does he
want to forge a deeper center-left majority coalition that can make wise
use of government to create jobs, spur growth, promote equity and find
solutions to global problems short of war? Since he has always been a
liberal speaking mainly to the center, he can go either way.The Democrats have a longer-term choice. Do they want to be the Blue Dog party of neoliberalism elite, best summed up by a Rahm Emanuel
policy of “unite the center,” move to the Right and dismiss the Left?
Or do they want to revisit their Keynesian roots with a Green New Deal
that builds an educational and manufacturing infrastructure for the 21st century? The first course means the country continues its steady reactionary drift, rewarding a privileged few. The second means a progressive turn that can reward the rest of us.

The
Left faces a choice, too. Do we continue trying to build mass
movements, in the hope that they will be the engines of a new and
transformative strategic politics? Or do we go further than our usual
“movement building” mantra and put new emphasis on organization
building? We’ve seen the Wisconsin and Ohio uprisings, Occupy Wall
Street, and the pressing of the Robin Hood tax
by the Congressional Progressive Caucus—all of which are the beginnings
of an emerging popular front against finance capital, one pregnant with
new potential. But without organization, movements simply ebb and
flow—and often dissipate. Our task now is to combine fanning the flames
with a new organizing thrust.We have to evolve political groups
with electoral capacities than can win elections locally. We must expand
the ranks of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, turning it into our
left- progressive pole inside the Beltway.

We have to encourage more social justice trade unions, like the Chicago Teachers Union. We have to grow our grassroots coalitions, like the Virginia New Majority, and to launch solidarity economy projects, like Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives.
We have to promote a new culture of educating with reason, promoting
science over ideology, and defending the core democratic values of the
Enlightenment. We must speak truth to power while we fashion the
instruments to take power. In brief, we require a united, determined
core of Left political organizers with a wider and deeper vision for
economic democracy and a socialism worthy of the 21st century.

Most
progressives have long embraced a clear alternative to the conservative
story that prosperity flows best from a “free market” unfettered by
government regulation and taxes. The standard progressive response:
government incentives and spending are essential to spur the creation of
jobs, and unions and regulations can make them “good jobs.”

President
Obama’s re-election by a surprisingly healthy margin (he won by 3.5
million in the popular vote and by 126 in the Electoral College)
confirmed substantial support for this overall approach to the economy.
Despite deep economic suffering throughout Obama’s first term, the
public validated his advocacy for more progressive taxes, his ideas
about the positive role that government must play in regulation, and his
call for public investment in training, education and research. All of
this adds up to a significant defeat for the free-market ideologues who
lined up behind Mitt Romney.

But here’s the catch: while Obama’s
policies have the short-term potential to improve the lives of many
Americans beleaguered by the economic slump, the approach he champions
is insufficient to tackle the long-term problems we face. To secure a
safe and prosperous future for subsequent generations, efforts to reduce
unemployment and curb inequality must be considered alongside urgent
threats to the environment and democracy. These crises present a
compelling argument for systemic change.

Just a week before an
election in which both candidates largely ignored the environment,
Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast and put climate change at
center stage. Who would have imagined Bloomberg Businessweek
with a cover trumpeting “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” as the magazine
did just days after the storm? Climate chaos is at the core of our
environmental crisis, but the problem also includes dwindling supplies
of potable water, the destruction of forests and oceans, and the
depletion of the planet’s biodiversity. Simply put, jobs that threaten
the environment cannot be considered good jobs.

The assault on
democracy by growing corporate control of our workplaces, our politics
and our economy presents another deepening crisis. Roughly $6 billion
was spent to influence and distort the political process in the 2012
elections, with a huge portion of this staggering sum coming from Wall
Street and the wealthy. This dire situation demands that we put a
premium on alternative forms of collective ownership and a shift from
giant corporations and banks to smaller enterprises rooted in
communities.

From
the Chicago teachers’ strike to WalMart walkouts to protests at fast
food restaurants across New York City, 2012 is shaping up to be the year
that labor fought back.

Thursday, coming less than one week
after the Black Friday WalMart walkouts, hundreds of fast food
restaurant workers are striking in high-traffic commercial centers in
Manhattan and Brooklyn. The strikes, which began at 6 am this morning
and will continue throughout the day, will hit some of the world’s
biggest fast food chains, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Dominos, Burger
King, Kentucky Friend Chicken and Taco Bell, and carry an
industry-shaking demand: the right to unionize and wage increases to $15
an hour.

Fast food workers in New York City earn just below $9.00 an hour on
average, and rarely receive health care, paid sick days or other
benefits that make it possible to live in an expensive urban center like
New York City. These workers are also often given only 20 or 30 hours
of work a week, which keeps their annual income far below the poverty
line. According to organizers on the campaign, many workers have to
resort to collecting public assistance, eating at their restaurants to
save money and sometimes even living in homeless shelters--necessities
that not only make their lives incredibly challenging but also put
intense strain on the city’s social safety net.

The top companies, meanwhile, have been netting considerable profits; according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Jaffe ,
Taco Bell and KFC’s profits have risen nearly 50 percent over the last
four years, and McDonald’s have jumped a staggering 130 percent. Most
troubling, these types of low-wage, low-protection jobs are the majority of positions
being created as the economy slowly recovers from the 2008 recession.
According to a report by the National Employment Law Project, nearly 60
percent of the jobs added since the recession have been these types of
low-wage jobs, particularly in retail sales and food preparation.

Given
the intense economic inequality of this rapidly growing industry, the
sector is ripe for worker organizing. However, the high turnover rate in
the industry and the challenge of battling some of the world’s most
massive corporations has thus far deterred any group from launching an
ambitious and comprehensive campaign.

Beginning in
January of this year, New York Communities for Change, in partnership
with UnitedNY, the Black Institute the Service Employees International
Union, and faith groups across the city, set out to change that legacy,
deploying more than three dozen full-time organizers into the city’s
fast food sector.

Despite a long history of "egregious violations," the behemoth oil company'stemporary suspension from obtaining lucrative government contracts may turn out to be much shorter than expected. "BP
is a serious serial corporate environmental criminal and a corporate
serial killer.... [The company] always settles its cases with the
government and promises to change its culture, but it continues to do
the same thing over and over again."-- Jeanne Pascal, former EPA debarment counsel

On
Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a surprise
announcement stating that, effective immediately, the oil behemoth and
more than a dozen of its subsidiary companies will be "ineligible" to "receive any federal contract or approved subcontract" as a result of BP's agreement to plead guilty two weeks ago to a wide range of crimes directly related to the deadly April 2010 disaster in the Gulf.

"EPA
is taking this action due to BP's lack of business integrity as
demonstrated by the company's conduct with regard to the Deepwater
Horizon blowout, explosion, oil spill and response as reflected by the
filing [by the Justice Department] of a criminal information," the EPA said in its statement.

The notice of suspension,
sent to BP PLC chief executive Robert Dudley, states that on November
23 the EPA's suspension and debarment division recommended that BP
immediately be suspended from government contract work. The notice of
suspension typically is preceded by a complaint document that lays out
all of the reasons suspension and debarment is sought. The EPA did not
provide Truthout with a copy of the complaint.

In a news release
BP issued after it settled criminal charges related to the Gulf
disaster, BP said the company "has not been advised of the intention of
any federal agency to suspend or debar the company in connection with
this plea agreement."

The EPA's announcement, which does not apply
to BP's existing federal contracts, was made the same day the
Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up for sale
to oil companies more than 20 million acres in the Western Gulf of
Mexico for oil and natural gas exploration and development. Also, on
Wednesday, two BP supervisors who were aboard the Deepwater Horizon when
it exploded were arraigned on manslaughter charges, and a former BP
vice president was arraigned on false statements and obstruction of
Congress. All three pleaded not guilty.

A BP spokeswoman said the
company already had decided before the decision by the EPA to sit out
Wednesday's lease sale. But the EPA's suspension would also have covered
new drilling leases and so the timing of the agency's announcement does
not appear to be coincidental. BP was the high bidder in June for 43
leases to drill in the Central Gulf of Mexico, not far from the site of
where the Macondo well ruptured and spewed millions of barrels of oil
into the waters. BP is the largest deepwater leaseholder in the Gulf.But after the EPA announced BP's suspension, BP quickly issued a statement, downplaying the EPA's action and attempting to reassure its shareholders,
saying that the corporation "has been in regular dialogue with the
EPA" and is already negotiating with federal regulators to lift the ban.

The extreme weather events of 2012 are what we have been warning of for 25 years, but the answer is plain to see

Will our short attention span be the end of us? Just a month after the second "storm of a century" in two years, the media moves on to the latest scandal with barely a retrospective glance at the implications of the extreme climate anomalies we have seen.

Ask
the homeowners along the New Jersey and New York shores still homeless.
Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to
their cold, darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast,
reeling from a catastrophe whose cost is estimated at $50bn and rising.
(I am not brave enough to ask those who've lost husbands or wives,
children or grandparents).

I bring up these facts sadly, as one
who has urged us to heed the scientific evidence on climate change for
the past 25 years. The science is clear: climate change is here, now.

Superstorm
Sandy is not the first storm, and certainly won't be the last. Still,
it is hard for us as individual human beings to connect the dots. That's
where observation, data and scientific analysis help us see.No
credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by almost
1.5C over land areas in the past century, most of that in the past 30
years.

Anyone
who lived in this city in 1978 remembers that morning, four days after
Thanksgiving, when Supervisor Dan White walked through City Hall with a
revolver and shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the
city's first openly gay supervisor.

So on Tuesday, 34 years after
the tragic incident, city officials, the Milk and Moscone families, LGBT
supporters and much of the San Francisco community gathered on the
steps of City Hall in memory.
"Let's get this straight: George and
Harvey did not die heroically. It was a senseless act," said Jonathan
Moscone, George's youngest son, according to SF Appeal. Jonathan was a 14-year-old freshman at St. Ignatius High School when his father was killed.

White
was convicted of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder, a decision
that led to the violent White Night riots at City Hall. The conviction
was widely viewed as too lenient, and made famous the "Twinkie defense"
that helped White in court.

"We're all agents of change like George and Harvey were," he said. All of us have a voice."
Other speakers expressed the same sentiment.

"Harvey
Milk was a visionary whose life and death had a profound effect on the
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community," said Anne Kronenberg,
Milk's former aide, per SF Weekly. "He is remembered for his passion and his perseverance in his quest for equality for all people."

The
National Organization for Marriage has sunk to a new low of
intolerance. In a “Thanksgiving Message” from Jennifer Roback Morse of
NOM’s Ruth Institute, she warns that young people are being “pressured”
to support LGBT equality because they have gay friends and peers. Morse
relates a story of a Catholic resident assistant (RA) at a college who
didn’t want to participate in the “drag party” being organized by her
gay supervisor. The supervisor was supposedly “really leaning on her”
and trying to “make her feel bad, make her look bad,” an example of a
pro-LGBT strategy that Morse feels is a much more significant threat
than the media:

MORSE: I think a lot of our students are encountering this type of situation in their dorms and on their college campuses… What I want to say to you, is that the other side has RAs in the dorm where your young people are going to school.
There’s no TV message that is going to do the job of countering that
type of influence. Somebody’s got to be there talking to young people
one at a time in the places where they’re hanging out and doing the
things that they’re doing. There’s no mass media strategy by itself that
will solve this problem. [...]And this holiday season, when your young people come home from college, ask them about this. Ask them if they have a gay RA in their dorms…
So please, talk to your young people about this and see what kind of
pressure they may be under that maybe even they don’t realize how much
it’s having an impact upon them.

As an organization that hears first-hand from the women who bear the burden of Ireland’s archaic abortion laws, the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar was shocking and sickening.

And yet not as surprising as you’d think.

Given
that abortion laws in Ireland are among the strictest in the world, a
tragedy of this kind wasn’t so much a matter of if, but when. The
circumstances in which Savita died are truly abhorrent. Admitted to
hospital experiencing a miscarriage at 17 weeks, despite being told that
the fetus “wasn’t viable” she was made to suffer for days, left begging
for an abortion that she was refused as long as there was a foetal
heart beat.Haunted by the harrowing details of Savita’s death
we’re left to wonder how many more women in Ireland may have lost their
lives as a result of being denied a life-saving abortion.

If
Savita’s family hadn’t bravely made the decision to go public, would her
senseless death have come to light? Have the lives of more women been
sacrificed because a fetus was deemed more important? Even when it was
known that the fetus would not survive? When, technically in Ireland an
abortion is permitted if there is a “real and substantial risk to the
life of the mother?” These are questions that we cannot ignore and
questions that demand answers.

Savita’s death is the worst
illustration of what happens when abortion is highly restricted, and the
worst way for the ‘pro-life’ lobby to be proved wrong. How often do we
hear that abortion is never necessary to save the life of a
woman? A protester at a vigil for Savita hit the nail on the head with a
placard stating ‘Pro-Life beliefs killed Savita Halappanavar – Ireland
needs abortion rights.’ So did Kartha Pollit in her compelling reflection on the caseWhen ‘Pro-Life’ kills.

But
what has been absent from the mainstream media coverage of Savita’s
death has been the mass, day-in day-out misery and discrimination
experienced by women as a result of the near-total ban on abortion in
Ireland.

While Republicans consider a compromise regarding the
looming “fiscal cliff,” they insist on refusing to learn the lessons of
this month’s election when it comes to social issues like abortion.
Nationally, the GOP seems to regard the fact that they still maintain
majority in the House, one of the few places where they didn’t suffer
humiliating defeat, as a mandate from the people. We have already seen
this happen in their steadfast refusal to vote for the Senate’s Violence Against Women Act because
it would protect Native American women, immigrants, and gay, lesbian or
transgender individuals. Unfortunately, as the few states who are still
held in Republican majority begin their legislative sessions, we also
are witness to brazen acts against women’s rights on a state level.

Arkansas
is one of those states that have a Republican House, Senate, and
governorship. Enthused by the supposed mandate of the 2012 election,
Arkansas state leaders have chosen to direct their energies not toward
job creation or other economic solutions, but toward their sick fixation
with abortion. One man, Rep. Andy Mayberry, was
very enthused by the majority his party holds in that state and his
chances for pushing through anti-choice laws that severely limit women’s
access to abortion and contraception:

“I will say that basically any opportunity now is more than any opportunity than we had in the previous session.”

When I asked UniteWomen.Org’s
Arkansas State Director, Jennifer Moser, what she and her organization
thought about the impending threat of new legislation from Rep. Mayberry
and his friends, she was very concerned. In her written response to me
she said that, “The war on women is far from over.” In fact, what she
describes is obviously just that, an organized attack on women as part
of the War on Women:

“Pro-Life organizations in Arkansas
are pushing lawmakers to pass anti-choice legislation for the upcoming
89th general assembly. Arkansas Right To Life is currently petitioning
residents on anti-choice legislation. According to their website, they
are requesting signatures to ban “web cam” abortions, to ban abortions
on an unborn child capable of feeling pain, and to opt out of the
abortion coverage in the Obama healthcare law.

“There
have been bills in the past that have tried to limit or ban abortions in
Arkansas. The most recent, HB1887, which was sponsored by Rep. Andy
Mayberry, was adjourned without assigning a date for further decision.

Environmental Protection Agency accuses oil giant of a 'lack of business integrity' over its behaviour following 2010 Gulf spill

BP has been blocked from seeking new contracts with the US government because of the oil
company's "lack of business integrity" during the Gulf of Mexico oil
disaster, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday.

The
temporary order bans BP from competing for new oil leases in the Gulf of
Mexico – such as the auction of 20m acres taking place on Wednesday –
or from bidding on new contracts to supply the Pentagon or other
government agencies with fuel.

While the ban does not affect existing business, it raises wider questions about the company's future in a crucial market.

The
type of suspension imposed by the EPA typically does not last more than
18 months. But an official said that in this case the ban could be
extended because of the ongoing legal proceedings. That could mean BP,
the largest oil producer in the Gulf of Mexico, would remain under an
extended moratorium until all criminal charges and law suits are
resolved.

BP was clearly taken by surprise and struggled to
explain the impact on its business. Its shares fell nearly 2% in London
as investors reacted with dismay to the news which puts a major dent in
the company's already battered reputation.

The finance director of
the London-based oil group warned investors at a recent presentation
that any outright ban could "affect BP's investment thesis in the US".

The
order was handed down just two weeks after BP agreed to plead guilty to
manslaughter and other charges arising from the April 2010 explosion of
the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, as well as pay a record $4.5bn in fines.

Animal welfare advocates, rejoice

by Ocean Robbins Published on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 by Common DreamsIn
one of history's most stunning victories for humane farming,
Australia's largest supermarket chain, Coles, will as of January 1 stop
selling company branded pork and eggs from animals kept in factory
farms. As an immediate result, 34,000 mother pigs will no longer be kept
in stalls for long periods of their lives, and 350,000 hens will be
freed from cages.

Not to be outdone, the nation's other dominant supermarket chain, Woolworths, has already begun
phasing out factory farmed animal products. In fact all of Woolworth's
house brand eggs are now cage-free, and by mid-2013 all of their pork
will come from farmers who operate stall-free farms.

Coles and Woolworths together account for a dominant 80 percent of all supermarket sales in Australia.The move to open up the cages was fueled by "consumer sentiment," and it has been synchronous with a major campaign
against factory farming of animals led by Animals Australia. The
campaign features a TV ad, titled "When Pigs Fly," in which an adorable
piglet tells the story of animals sentenced to life in cramped cages,
and then flies to freedom.

Meanwhile, in the United States, egg factory farms
cram more than 90 percent of the country's 280 million egg-laying hens
into barren cages so small the birds can't even spread their wings. Each
bird spends her entire life given less space than a sheet of paper. And
in a reality that does not please fans of Wilber or Babe, between 60 to 70 percent
of the more than five million breeding pigs in the United States are
kept in crates too small for them to so much as turn around.

There are laws against cruelty to animals in the United States, but most states specifically exempt
animals destined for human consumption. The result is that the animal
agriculture industry routinely does things to animals that, if you did
them to a dog or a cat, would get you put in jail.

Gene Baur,
president of Farm Sanctuary, explains: "Most of the anti-cruelty laws
exempt farm animals as long as the practices are considered to be normal
by the agriculture industry. What has happened is that bad has become
normal, and no matter how cruel it is, normal is legal."

From Green Left: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/52933By Simon ButlerTuesday, November 27, 2012The
World Bank delivered a brutal warning about the dangers of runaway
climate change and called for rapid action to cut greenhouse gas
emissions in a recent report. But don’t expect the bank to take its own
advice.

The bank released its Turn Down the Heat
report on climate change on November 18. Subtitled “Why a 4 degree
warmer world must be avoided”, the report said the world is headed for a
4°C average temperature rise by the end of the century, and possibly as
soon as 2060.

On today’s trends, a 4°C world is almost certain —
even if all nations were to meet their current targets to cut emissions.
That is, the existing pledges to cut emissions made at recent
international climate talks are not enough to make a difference.

The report makes clear that a 4°C world would be a global calamity.
The World Bank said a 4°C temperature rise would lead to average summer
temperatures about 6°C higher in North Africa, the Mediterranean, the
Middle East and North America.

The higher temperatures will also mean “a dramatic increase in the intensity and frequency of high temperature extremes”.

These extremes, such the unprecedented Russian heatwave of 2010, would become “the new normal summer”. The Russian heatwave caused more than 10,000 deaths and wiped close to $15 billion off the country’s GDP.

The big rise in CO2
levels would also cause a 150% rise in ocean acidification by 2100,
something probably “unparalleled in Earth’s history”. This would spell
the end for the world’s coral reefs but also wipe out global fish
stocks, which the WWF says are due to collapse anyway by mid-century from overfishing. Today, about 1 billion people worldwide rely on fish as their main protein source.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson